MMM - Starry Soldiers Sortie in Sordid Strife Started by Shrunken Shrieking Singer (Halloween 2022)

Are they clubs? Are they whips? Are they “swords” ribbed for her pleasure? Entirely depends on who you ask, or how literally you look at the characters. Or how horny you are, I guess.

All I know is that I really want to give her the confidence to finish the black cat pancakes song.

So far as Huyan’s base stats go they aren’t, uh, particularly great. With the 2nd lowest Attack stat among her fellow SSR Assassins, and the tied 2nd best HP stat, her spread may seem fairly typical, but those rankings don’t show how she has a pretty bad stat deficit in general compared to other SSR Assassins like Koyanskaya, Kama, or King Hassan, on top of lacking their more offensively-leaned stat spread.

Being more defensive isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but having poorer offensive stats harms her when she is an offensive Servant, on top of her being weaker stat-wise in general.

She does thankfully get some compensation from her passives. With the typical Presence Concealment boosting her stargen, she also has Riding of a solid rank, boosting her primary card type’s damage output by a modest sum, and lastly a unique passive in Phantasmal Beast Possession, which raises her Buster cards’ Critical Star Gather Rate slightly. Not the most powerful unique passive out there, but it’s something to raise her damage output, as is her Riding.

On the whole, not the greatest start, but Huyan has some things going for her.

At this point I should probably expect to feel disappointed by at least one Servant every batch when I hit this section. With a base NP gain of 0.53%, Huyan’s base Arts gain on her single 4-hit Arts card rounds out to 2.12, more or less dead on the average for a Servant of her card set.

The issue with her base NP gain, however, is it actively hurts the NP gain of her primary card types, her Buster and Quick cards. With 3 hits and 4 hits on both apiece, they would have respectable NP gauge generation if not for how her base NP gain has been hit to compensate for her 4-hit Arts card. As a result, those Quicks are painfully average, and her Busters more or less un-noteworthy.

More or less the same story for her Extra card, with an average 5 hits to its name, ending up producing a very mediocre amount of gauge.

Things get better for her stargen, though. All those high hitcounts are good for something, and with both the Assassin class base stargen and her Presence Concealment backing her, Huyan produces a good sum of stars on pretty much all her cards, even more if she manages to get a Brave Chain out. Whether to provide crits for herself or her teammates, it’s a good thing to have, especially since crits more or less improve your NP gain by proxy, due to the doubled NP gain multiplier when a card crits.

While not spectacular, Huyan’s generation stats are solid enough to work with on the whole.

So how is Huyan on the whole? On one hand, she’s an absolute star, her kit a chain of unity keeping her bound together:

On the other hand, she’s bound to crash into the Earth’s atmosphere and burn up, sooner or later:

Huyan is fundamentally a pretty average Servant. That isn’t to say she’s bad, or doesn’t stand out, but simply that she isn’t breaking boundaries, despite having a lot of useful tools to her. She has a lot of potential to perform in difficult content with her synergy alongside Summer Skadi, and her numerous utility perks, but her overall mediocre damage output means for the majority of this game’s content, farming, she doesn’t stand out too much.

If you’re such an unfortunate sod to not have gotten the Valk Welfares in summer and really need an Assassin farmer, she’s a perfectly good Servant to get for that role. Likewise, she’s a very good pick for just a well-rounded offensive Servant in difficult content, but plenty of other Servants, Assassins or otherwise, can compete with her. Just bear that in mind if you’re considering rolling for her - plenty of fish in the sea, or in this case, plenty of stars in the sky. Rath™ Seal of Approval.

For some reason it feels like an eternity since we’ve had a male Servant that is just a cool, fairly upstanding dude with prowess as a warrior. For a while now it’s kind of felt like a slew of nudists…or pretty boys…or some kind of inbetween.

But not to worry, as with this young man of the Huang family, the dignity of the male cast is saved…just don’t ask him about Daji. Worst mistake of my life.

With the 6th Worst Attack stat in exchange for the 3rd best HP stat of his class and rarity, Feihu may have a defensively-leaning stat spread, but it’s a fairly strong one, not losing too much offensively for the additional bulk.

He’ll still come up lacking in comparison to the higher-attack Riders, but it’s a much more reasonable tradeoff than some Servants are dealt with, so even if he’s offensively-focused in his kit it isn’t much of a drawback.

He also gets compensated quite heavily on the Passives front, with 5 to his name. Magic Resistance, Riding, and Divinity are all fairly standard, providing him with some passive Debuff Resistance, a modest boost to his Quick cards, and some extra damage on his cards in exchange for Divinity weaknesses.

Feihu’s unique passives, however, are a little bit more interesting. Reed Spear Technique provides a small boost to his Buster Critical Damage, while Familial Bond of Huang gives him a couple of bonus crit stars to use each turn, as well as a further boost to his Debuff Resistance, making him rather resilient to debuffs overall.

Frankly, he’s got a nice set of base stats backing him, especially with those passives in play.

Oof, erm…maybe it won’t be just one Servant slapped with an awful base NP gain this batch. With a base NP gain of 0.42%, and 4-hits on his Arts cards, Feihu rocks up with a very average 1.68 base Arts gain, while simultaneously having the NP gain of his other cards pretty heavily crippled.

With a BBAAQ card deck, he’s already suffering a little from his plentitude of Busters in the NP gain department, but having that 4-hit Quick essentially generate as much as a vanilla launch Servant’s 2-hit Quick, and his 5-hit Extra be placed in a similar situation, Feihu is plagued by incredibly mediocre NP gain across the board.

His Arts cards aren’t in the worst position for it, but the rest of his card lineup is more or less pitiful for generating gauge, which can hurt him significantly over a long fight.

Feihu does a little better for stargen, but it’s hardly his focus. With Riding backing it, his Quick produces a tidy sum of stars, and his card hitcounts in general are reasonably high, but with a single Quick to his name, he isn’t exactly spewing out stars no matter how hard you try. His passive helps a little bit, but it’s hardly a free 2030 stapled onto his back.

It’s a shame, but Feifu really falls flat in this area.

So how does Feihu shape up? On one hand, he brings honour to his family name, and a rainbow bull…and a fancy sword…

However, he also can’t really beat the machinations of one little fox, or in this case, modern FGO game meta:

All I can really say is that Feihu feels like a particularly good release Servant, but not a particularly good one in, well, anything resembling modern FGO. He focuses almost entirely on his offensive output, which doesn’t really break records to begin with, and invests it in a NP / card type that is pretty difficult to make stand out.

If his section feels particularly brief, that’s ultimately because there’s little to discuss on him, and I’d rather not flounder trying to find some redeeming point to push. He’s not that great.

Liz’s goal of world domination by flooding FGO with her alts progresses ever-closer to completion. And this time she does it by appropriating Chinese culture due to her obsession with being a dragon.

It’s almost a worse crime than killing a bunch of women and bathing in their blood.

As the, well, second 4* Pretender in the game, Loli Liz sadly doesn’t have a great pool of Servants to compare herself to. She is, however, slightly inferior to her sole competitor in Hephaestion, but carries the relatively-strong base stat total of the Pretender class regardless.

She hits fairly hard compared to most SR Servants, and also has a solid HP stat to keep her alive. Certainly better than the deal some other renditions of Liz get.

As for passives, she hasn’t really got an expansive lineup. Independent Action provides a minor boost to her own Critical Damage, while her unique variant of Territory Creation (pretty much being the cause of our miniature farming simulator in the event, putting our Servant roster to work in 108 different places) gives her a modest boost to both her Arts cards and stargen.

Those two skills alone carry a lot of weight, especially compared to some more useless passives out there, but she doesn’t have a stacked set of passives, regardless.

On the whole, she’s working with a solid baseline, especially when she’s in a class with little competition.

Arriving at the last minute to save this MMM from a plague of poor NP gain, Loli Liz thankfully has a reasonable base NP gain of 0.77%. When put in combination with her 3-hit Arts card and Territory Creation, she clocks in at a base Arts gain of 2.44, above average for most 1-Arts card decks.

She doesn’t really slack in the rest of her kit, either. With two 4-hit Quicks to her name, they also provide a good sum of NP gauge for Quick cards, and her Extra card has a typical hitcount of 5, but when backed by her base NP gain, that results in more NP gauge than most Servants can put to their name.

Fundamentally, her BBAQQ card deck isn’t the best at generating NP gauge, but all things considered she has better NP gain than most in the same situation.

And it doesn’t stop there. As you may expect from her high Quick hitcount, Liz’s stargen is also pretty good. Once you factor in the Pretender class’s excellent base stargen and her own boost from her passive, Liz generates stars on her cards like an Assassin would, and it certainly shows in her gameplay. She won’t necessarily drown you in them, especially if you don’t pull either of her Quicks in a chain, but she’s more than capable of dropping a tidy sum for the team to put to use.

So how is Kumonryu Liz overall? Well on the one hand, she’s the pillar of Eastern culture, a symbol of strength and dignity, and her plushies are super cute:

However, she’s also the larva of the greatest menace to ever plague Chaldea, the “One-Who-Screeches”, a child whose voice will eventually grow into a force beyond all comprehension, rupturing eardrums with no regard for your opinion. Oh, and also the whole “killing-women-and-bathing-in-their-blood” thing:

Frankly, if Lasengle produces a welfare in a class that doesn’t yet have a budget option to them, they could have Caster Gilles’ kit and I’d probably still consider them great. Factoring in that Liz is pretty good even if she weren’t a Pretender, she’s naturally an excellent choice to use in the future.

…even if she can’t farm. At least with Quick/Arts AOE Servants, they get a gradual buildup to their NP gain numbers, that usually produces a sliding scale of “How good at farming” they are. For Buster Servants it’s unfortunately harsher, and Liz has to deal with the reality of being incapable of it in any serious capacity at the point her kit was locked on.

But enough dooming and glooming. She’s a good offensive Pretender, a solid low-cost support option, and she somehow managed to break the curse most Liz Servants bear of being mediocre to bad, so good on her. Even if she’s not a game-breaking staple to add to your roster. Rath™ Seal of Approval.